Imperial Disaster Warning (from the Government Accountability Office)
by C. L. Cook

Perched on a "burning platform" is how David Walker of the non-partisan GAO describes the nation under George W. Bush. In an interview with the Financial Times, Walker implored the administration, and the citizenry learn from the fall of ancient Rome.

 
It's a scarifying message to the nation, made more frightening when considering: David Walker is no mere bureaucrat beefing from the bowels of another dissed and/or neglected government department; David Walker is the Number One comptroller for federal government spending, whose only job is to look at the books and determine what a given administration is doing and where its policy is likely to lead the country financially. And if Walker's take is worth anything, it's the end of days soon, should drastic measures not be taken now.

 

 

Fire and the Roman Empire go together in the popular imagination like Nero and fiddle music, and it's a latter day Nero Comptroller Walker would paint George W. Bush's administration as, (not after all Caligula, as many others have suggested). According to FT's Jeremy Grant, Walker's litany of ails threatening to breach the walls of Empire America include: unsustainable fiscal deficits; chronic health care under and non-funding; and, immigration and military spending rises. And, this is just the beginning for the report the GAO characterizes as a "chilling" series of "long-term simulations."

"Striking," says Walker are the similarities of situation between America today and the doomed empire of the Caesars, citing declining moral values, degraded political civility and discourse at home, over-extended military campaigns abroad, and fiscal recklessness, combining to create a portrait of two peoples separated by centuries yet afflicted with the self-same bloated hubris.

 

Grimly, in Walker's vision of the country's future a government driven to financial crisis will need to dramatically raise taxes, cut programs, and brace for a currency crash as foreign debt holders dump U.S. bonds and notes.

 

Sounding a man near the end himself, he says, "I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call." He says the country is not taking the challenges to the long-term sustainability of the nation "seriously enough."

 

In the report, Walker cites Bush administration policy on energy, education, environment, immigration, and Iraq as leading the country along an "unsustainable path."

 

 

 

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